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BY LISA KAMPETER

Just south of Tower Grove Park in South City sits the Tin Can Tavern and Grille, a restaurant and bar with a born on date of just over a year ago. When you’re there, you can’t help but reminisce about when beer was a buck, and you pulled a tab to get it open, meatloaf and pot-roast, grilled cheese and steaming soup, old time rock ‘n roll and Ms. Pacman…the good ole days.

The Dining Divas decided to try someplace laid back and low maintenance, and the Tin Can Tavern met the requirements. Located on Morganford just off Arsenal, the Tin Can was hoppin’ the Thursday night we were there. There wasn’t an empty table to be found, and the place was a sea of red thanks to the entertainment from the St. Louis Cardinals.

Regular Thursday nights (and Fridays and Saturdays), there’s live music, but this was no regular night. The packed crowd inside would have forced a band to set up on the sidewalk outside.

The walls are covered with can koozies personalized for the regulars. If you’re looking to pop-a-top, they’ve got everything from Hamm’s to Foster’s. For those of you too nervous to step outside of the Anheuser-Busch zone, they’ve got those covered, too… and in bottles.

Note to self, bottles don’t stack up quite as well as cans especially when you’re building pyramids on your table. The Tin Can Tavern’s great beer selection brings you back to your college days when cheap can beer was all you could afford.

Although the clientele was slightly younger than our group, the menu appealed more to our age group. There were too many things we wanted to try, but we just didn’t have room for. Too many things that reminded us of being kids. Fried bologna. Corn dogs. Cottage cheese.

Most in our group enjoyed the wedge salad with a wedge of iceberg lettuce, tomato, and crouton topped off with tomato bacon ranch dressing. A bowl of the roasted chicken and rice soup hit the spot for those a little under the weather.

Then, the group went straight for comfort with classic comfort food. Meatloaf with mashed potatoes…the kind of meatloaf with the ketchup sauce and the kind of potatoes with lumps still in them, served with rosemary gravy. It was great! Grilled cheese and tomato bisque…another classic combination with the soup being creamy and slightly sweet.

The “bottom dweller” meal as it was called on the menu didn’t kill the appetite of one Diva as she really loved the crispy, golden catfish dinner. The “pot and the kettle” or pot roast was really our only disappointment. It could have used a few more spices, and the homemade mac and cheese could have used less sugar. It tasted sweet.

The Tin Can Tavern and Grille is a great neighborhood bar in a neighborhood that is trying to revive its nightlife. It’s a great place to go watch a game (they have football specials—even a free bucket of beer for groups of five or more) and to grab a bite to eat. Way back when, PBR and Schlitz were just considered cheap. Now, they’re classics and cool at the Tin Can Tavern and Grille.
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